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El
artículo siguiente de Steve Fuller se publica aquí por tener una relación
estrecha con el publicado en el último número de Galileo y con el muy
reciente libro suyo The philosophy of science and technology studies, de
mayo de 2006. Ello llama a una consideración conjunta de los tres textos. BACK
TO THE FUTURE WITH BIOLIBERALISM OR, THE NEED TO REINVENT
SOCIALISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCE IN
THE 21st CENTURY Steve FULLER Introduction:
The Disappearance of Society in the Bioliberal Era Signs of the times appear in
the most unlikely places. In the 3 October 1987 issue of Women’s Own, a
supermarket magazine targeting UK housewives, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
made the most notorious and profound assertion of her career: I
think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to
understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with
it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm homeless, the government must
house me.' They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is
no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are
families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people
must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then,
also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in
mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless
someone has first met an obligation. This assertion unleashed a
torrent of social scientific, social theoretic, and socialistic critique,
perhaps most notably the earnest Fabian Society pamphlet (no. 536), ‘Does
society exist?’ Authored by Brian Barry, an analytic philosopher who was then
Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics, the pamphlet
dutifully weighed the arguments on both sides of the issue before concluding
that, contrary to Mrs Thatcher’s assertion, society does indeed exist. While
Barry may have succeeded in assuaging the fears of Labour Party operatives,
little had he realized that Thatcher was anticipating what is nowadays,
generally speaking, a rather respectable and self-styled ‘progressive’ view
across the arts and sciences. I call this emergent sensibility bioliberalism.
However, in world-historic terms it marks a great leap backward to the
moment when the market first asserted itself against traditional forms of social
life – the ‘great transformation’ in European history described in Karl
Polanyi (1944). For Polanyi, this moment created the original need for
socialism. Whether something similar will happen this time remains an open
question. My argument is informed by a
prediction that I hope will be self-defeating. I believe that, unless steps are
taken to the contrary, we are in the process of systematically forgetting the
intuitions that were common to the founders of socialism as a distinct political
movement and social science as an autonomous body of knowledge. The most
fundamental common intuition was that humanity is a project in the making,
one achieved by organizing a certain kind of animal in a certain range of ways.
This is the primary normative meaning of ‘society’ in the modern sense, and
the nation-state has been its main legal executor. From this standpoint, while
humanity is very much within the potential of homo sapiens, the species
need not develop in that direction. Indeed, history has thrown up many ways of
retarding and even pre-empting what is fairly called the ‘socialist’
project, once all members of homo sapiens are not treated as full
participants in its construction. The socialist project has
been traditionally inhibited or destroyed from two directions. One involves
specifying a clear hierarchy within homo sapiens that makes it unlikely
that all of its members can ever be equal participants in the project of
humanity. The other involves the reverse motion of flattening the distinction
between homo sapiens and other animals, such that the concept of humanity
loses its metaphysical grounding altogether, and socialism is thus seen as too
restrictive. In the early 19th century, humanistically inclined
conservatives occupied the former position, and naturalistically inclined
liberals the latter. Feudalism and Darwinism defined this polar opposition, both
conceptually and historically. In the early 21st
century, the allegiances may be scrambled, but their collective consequence no
less crowds out the prospects for the realization of the socialist project. In
this respect, the new biotechnology marks not a radical break with the past, but
an excuse to turn back the clock – specifically 200 years. That such a thing
could happen is a by-product of these postmodern times, in which the very idea
of progress (and hence regress) in the moral and political spheres is considered
such a non-starter that there is never anything to ‘gain’ or ‘lose’,
objectively speaking, by calling into question the project of humanity. The
collective mind simply becomes distracted by other matters. At the same time,
for those not so driven to distraction, the new biotechnology does provide
opportunities for a reinvention of both socialism and social science. Recalling the Past Link between Socialism and Social Science To be sure, during the Cold
War, and especially in the United States, the link between ‘socialism’ and
‘social science’ was treated as little more than an accident of spelling.
(At least, so I was told as an undergraduate sociology major at Columbia in
1977.) At that time, under the historiographical influence of Raymond Aron and
Robert Nisbet, sociology was said to have emerged as a reaction to the French
Revolution of 1789, which in the name of Reason had tried to replace, in one
fell swoop, centuries of traditional order with a planned society. Sociology, at
its best, realized that this Enlightenment utopia was really a totalitarian
nightmare in disguise, which would always fail to contain the paradoxical yet
resilient character of human nature, as expressed in so-called ‘organic’
institutions like the family and the church. (From a strictly legal standpoint,
one to which the original German sociologists were especially sensitive, these
two institutions had radically different bases – the family being involuntary
and the church voluntary. Nevertheless, that fact did not trouble the Cold
Warriors, who focused on the anti-statism common to the two institutions.) In
this genealogy, the arch French diplomatic observer of American affairs, Alexis
de Tocqueville, figured as a founding father of the discipline, whereas one of
his most avid readers and Auguste Comte’s British publicist, John Stuart Mill,
did not. The difference, of course, was that de Tocqueville anticipated the Cold
Warrior’s sense that democracy forces a trade-off between liberty and
equality, whereas Mill held to the more ‘socialist’ idea that the two
virtues could be jointly maximized with the rational redistribution of excess
wealth. Notwithstanding this Cold
War attempt to manipulate sociology’s past, it is difficult to deny that the
fortunes of socialism and social science have risen and fallen together. In what
follows, I assume a common post-Cold War view about the background against which
sociology was originally defined, namely, the Industrial Revolution in late 18th
and early 19th century Britain. Instead of the planned society, the
implicit foe of the nascent sociological discipline was the emergent capitalist
form of life that threatened to level the hard-won difference between civilized
society and brute animal existence. Depending on the Enlightenment philosopher
one chooses, this difference had been won in classical Athens or republican Rome
but, in any case, had regressed in the Middle Ages when a Plato-inspired
hereditary hierarchy was used to protect Christianity from the threat of Islam,
which claimed its spiritual mantle by promising a genuine brotherhood of
humanity equal under the eyes of Allah. However, for the Enlightenment wits,
this threat was rebuffed by what (only since 1945) is called the ‘Scientific
Revolution’, which was in the process of liberating (‘secularising’)
Christianity of its feudal residue. At this point, it is worth
remarking that the twinned fate of socialism and social science is not so very
different from the relationship between the ecology movement and environmental
science, despite the efforts of the latter’s practitioners to distance
themselves from the former’s advocates. (What differentiates the eco-twins
from the socio-twins, of course, is that political-scientific support for the
eco-twins is ascendant.) In the case of both social science and environmental
science, it is important to stress that the issue here is the autonomy of
this body of knowledge from more established forms of humanistic and natural
scientific knowledge. After all, Thatcher never denied the existence of human
beings or even of such self-organizing social units as families. Similarly, she
did not deny that we have animal natures and live in a physical environment.
However, it is clear that she would have the normative and policy concerns that
have distinguished the social (and environmental) sciences subsumed under more
traditional socio-epistemic formations. And with the help of unwittingly
obliging intellectuals, that is indeed happening. The US lawyer-activist
Jeremy Rifkin has seen half the story. In what he calls the ‘age of
biology’, Rifkin (2001) rightly observes an ideological realignment, with
social conservatives and the ecological left combined in opposition to the
utilitarian view of life associated with biotechnology that is shared by the
free market liberals and what remains of the Marxists. However, Rifkin regards
this realignment as new, when in fact it marks a return the ideological state of
play during the Industrial Revolution before the rise of socialism. The early 19th
century debate was even couched as an anti- vs. pro-growth argument, as it is
today -- only with the factory, not the laboratory, functioning as the lightning
rod for people's hopes and fears. Back then protectors of the land and
developers of industry occupied clear ideological positions that were mutually
exclusive and jointly exhaustive. They were called Tories (Conservatives) and
Whigs (Liberals), and their corresponding forms of knowledge were later
immortalized by Matthew Arnold as the ‘cultured’ (humanists) and the
‘philistine’ (natural scientists) at a time when Britain was still innocent
of a ‘third culture’ of social science (Lepenies 1988). At that time, the
Tories were the paternalistic protectors of the inveterate poor, while the Whigs
regarded poverty as a retarded state of enterprise from which the poor had to be
released. Nowadays the two groups are
defined as Ecologists and Neo-Liberals, respectively, and their spheres of
concern have somewhat expanded. Ecologists extend their paternalism across
species, while Neo-Liberals believe that the state inhibits everyone’s – not
merely the poor’s – enterprising spirit. The ideological space marked by
this pre- and post-socialist world is captured in Figure 1.
Fig. 1. The political
landscape before and after socialism One key difference between
the 19th and the 21st century expressions of this matrix
is the exact nature of the thing that the opposing ideologues wish either to
protect or to free. In the 19th century, that thing was labour
power. Conservatives wanted to restrict labour both physically (i.e. the
ability of individuals to move house to find work) and conceptually (i.e. family
and guild prerogatives on the intergenerational transmission of property, trade,
and craft). In contrast, Liberals promised freedom along both dimensions: On the
one hand, Liberals wanted to sever people's hereditary ties to the land that
legally inhibited the construction of factories and people living near these
places of work; on the other, they wanted to dissociate labour from a specific
human embodiment, which effectively reduced labour to a form of what Marx called
'variable capital' that was ultimately replaceable by the 'fixed capital' of
technology. In the 21st century, the object of ecological protection
and neo-liberal emancipation is genetic potential (Fuller 2002a: chaps.
2-3). Thus, ecologists campaign for a global intellectual property regime that
prohibits 'bioprospectors' from appropriating the genetic potential of
indigenous peoples and the patenting of animal and plant species. Meanwhile,
neo-liberals envisage the aim of intellectual property legislation as simply the
removal of barriers from people freely trading – and being held responsible
for – their genetic potential as they would anything else in their possession.
Moreover, the neo-liberals follow the practice of past liberals of foreseeing
the replacement of the natural with the artificial, as the traded organic
material is eventually superseded by synthetic biochemical versions that produce
the same effects at less cost and risk. What had yet to exist in the
early 19th century -- and what is disappearing in the early 21st
century -- are the various shades of red that used to cut such a dashing figure
across the political landscape of Europe as socialist and social democratic
parties, as well as their distinctive forms of knowledge. To be sure, these
parties continue to exist, if only by virtue of organizational inertia -- an
ironic twist to the fate of the social democrats recounted in Roberto Michels’
1911 classic, Political Parties. Yet, as has become especially clear in
the UK and Northern Europe, the old socialist parties are subject to strong
countervailing forces from the ecologists and the neo-liberals. A more muted
version of this tension can be even found within the US Democratic Party (e.g.
the strength of the recent presidential candidacies of the ecologically minded
Ralph Nader and the neo-liberal Ross Perot). Socialism
as the Dialectical Synthesis of Conservatism and Liberalism We tend to forget that one
of socialism's achievements was to wed a broadly utilitarian, pro-science and
pro-industry policy perspective to an overarching sense of responsibility for
all of humanity, especially its most vulnerable members. It essentially
completed the secularisation of Christianity promised by the Enlightenment
(MacIntyre 1994). This movement started with the ‘religion of humanity’ of
the Marquis de Condorcet and Auguste Comte, extended through the various
socialist movements of the last 200 years, and was most successfully realized in
the heyday of the welfare state in the third quarter of the 20th
century. As Hegel and Marx might have it, the genius of socialism was to
generate an egalitarian political ethic from a dialectical synthesis of the two
countervailing forms of inegalitarianism that came to be consolidated by the end
of the 18th century: conservative paternalism and liberal
voluntarism. For the first time, a form of politics took seriously the idea --
at least as a regulative ideal of collective action -- that all people belonged
equally to homo sapiens. Socialism's inegalitarian
roots remain latent in the Marxist motto: ‘From each according to their
ability (the liberal credo) to each according to their need’ (the conservative
credo). Marxists imagined that a spontaneously mutually beneficial division of
labour would eventuate in a classless society. But what if we do not yet live in
'society degree zero' (the revolutionary moment) and classes are already in
existence? In the 19th century, conservatives could see in the
Marxist slogan the need to reproduce dependency relations, whereas liberals
could read it as a call for the free exchange goods and services. Both
conservatives and liberals imagined that a legally sanctioned system of
stratification would result in either case, be it based on ascription or
achievement. Moreover, each not only justified their own position but also
demonised that of their opponents, as in Charles Dickens’ fictional portrait
of the heartless liberal, Thomas Gradgrind, in Hard Times and Bram
Stoker’s satirization of the parasitic Austro-Hungarian aristocrat, Count
Dracula. The difference between these two forms of inegalitarianism are
illustrated in Figure 2:
Fig. 2. The two
inegalitarian sources of modern socialism The conservative strategy
was to reproduce the current social order, no matter the opportunity costs,
whereas the liberals wanted to invest current wealth most efficiently, no matter
the social dislocation that resulted. For British liberals, the Poor Laws, which
devoted 80% of local taxes to providing the poor with a modicum of food and
shelter, could be better spent on roads and other capital investments to attract
industry, thereby creating jobs that would enable the poor to provide for
themselves by contributing to the nation’s overall wealth. In contrast, the
conservatives believed that the cost of maintaining a secure life was a stable
hierarchy, which implied the perpetual reproduction of feudal dependency
relations between the rich and the poor. To destabilize this hierarchy would be
to incur untold damage, including unnecessary death. But for the liberals the
far greater cost of stability was that the poor were never given the opportunity
to rise to their appropriate level of merit (or die, if they prove incapable of
adapting to the needs of the market), which impeded the overall productivity of
society. Liberal political economists regarded the amount of unused inherited
land as the ultimate symbol of this squandered potential. Thus, the liberals began to
query how class divisions were drawn: why sheer property ownership rather than
earned income or merit? What is
touted as the 'individualism' of liberal political philosophy is simply the
realization that class divisions are conventional, if only because everyone is
endowed with the same innate capacities but differ in their opportunities to
employ those capacities. Liberals aspired to a world in which people could
dispose of their capacities just as landowners could of their property: Ideally,
you would be judged by what you did with your ‘possessions’ in this extended
sense, in a free environment. As we shall see, this perspective has come to be
reinvented as we acquire greater knowledge of specifically biological
capacities. In any case, liberals agreed with conservatives on the need for some
sort of principle of cumulative advantage but disagreed on its basis. In
particular, what was an appropriate principle of inheritance?
Legal theories of succession presupposed rather ancient biological views
about the passage of competence across generations of family members that
created grounds for a son’s entitlement to manage his father’s estate or
assume his trade (e.g. primogeniture). It was this common concern with the
transmission of accumulated advantage – what Richard Dawkins (1982) has
renovated as the ‘extended phenotype’ -- that would come to distinguish both
liberals and conservatives from socialists most clearly. The
Rise and Fall of the Welfare Concept: From Sociology to Socialism on the Cheap The question of inheritance
– the inter-generational transmission of property – was central to the
establishment of sociology in Germany, France, and the United States. The
concept of welfare was meant to capture a collective inheritance to which each
member of society contributed and from which each benefited, though – as Marx
stressed – not according to some default biologically based principle.
In the final quarter of the 19th century, all three nation-states
transformed the legal basis for incorporating individuals into the social order:
Germany consolidated, France secularised, and the US expanded. The first
president of the German Sociological Association, Ferdinand Toennies, christened
sociology’s founding distinction, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft,
as respectively the conservative and the liberal pole out of which this newly
integrated conception of society was forged. A legal scholar by training,
Toennies regarded this conception as the culmination of a medieval innovation in
Roman law. Until the twelfth century,
Roman law recognized two general categories of social life. In the ‘natural’
mode, property was transmitted through the family (gens), an equation of
biological reproduction and social succession. But there was also an
‘artificial’ mode for temporary associations (socius), such as
joint-stock companies and crusades, which were project-centred and ceased to
exist once the project was completed and its profits were distributed to the
project’s partners. The Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft distinction is
grounded in this contrast, which also persists in folk understandings of
biologically acquired traits as somehow more basic and durable than socially
acquired ones. Missing from these
two categories was an artificial social entity entitled to perpetual legal
protection because its ends transcend those of any or all of its members at any
given place and time. In the twelfth century, this entity (universitas)
was born. It is the source of the paradigmatic objects of social science
research. Originally populated by guilds, churches, and, of course,
universities, this realm of universitas gradually came to include still
larger corporate entities like states and firms, the constitution of which was
to be central to the sociology of Max Weber.
Considerable significance
has been invested in the universitas as a distinctive expression of
humanity. The presence of this legal category testifies to a conception of
society that is irreducible to either suprahuman fate or infrahuman drives –
that is, the domains of theology or biology. In this respect, Condorcet and
Hegel were only two of the more famous proto-sociologists who identified the
‘universal state’ with humanity rendered self-conscious. This identification
was based not on some misbegotten chauvinism about the French Republic or the
German Reich, but on the sheer logic of the concept of universitas. Not
surprisingly, Toennies had earned his scholarly reputation as the German
translator of Thomas Hobbes, who was among the first to exploit this logic for
some politically interesting purposes. Hobbes saw the potential of
the universitas for self-improvement through the normative regulation of
its members. Specifically, he recognized that this process would require the redistribution
of properties from natural individuals to the artificial corporate person
licensed as a universitas. For Hobbes, the fear and force that divide
individuals in the state of nature would be alienated and concentrated in his
version of universitas, the Leviathan state, whose absolute power would
then enable the individuals to engage in sustained peaceful associations that
would have the long-term consequence of fostering civilization, from which
subsequent generations might benefit. The socialist ideals realized in the
welfare state may be seen as having carried this logic one step further, as
income redistribution aimed to remove the class divisions that emerge
unintentionally from the advantage accumulated in post-Leviathan civil
associations, which then effectively create a ‘civilized’ version of the
state of nature, as Marx perhaps most vividly recognized. In his more Communist
moods, Marx seemed to believe that the proletarian revolution would devolve the
Hobbesian sovereign back to the people, who armed with self-consciousness and
modern modes of production, would be able to lead a secure and peaceful
existence. However, short of that utopian outcome, the threat of the Internal
Revenue Service ends up sublimating the threat originally posed by the
Leviathan. No one ever denied that the
redistribution of property (understood as both abstract qualities and concrete
holdings) entails what economists call 'transaction costs' – that is, the
costs involved in bringing about the redistribution. But how to ensure that
these costs are borne equitably and in ways that do not overwhelm the
transactions they are designed to sustain? A neat feature of the Hobbesian
solution – one long associated with Machiavelli – is that a credible threat
of force is self-economizing. In other words, the threat works to the extent
that it does not need to be acted upon, because prospective targets anticipate
its bloody consequences; hence they take pains to avoid conditions that would
result in those consequences. Of course, the threat needs to be credible in the
first place, which is why Hobbes emphasized the absoluteness of the sovereign's
power. Anything short of a complete monopoly of force would invite challenges
that would divide the sovereign's energies between securing the conditions for
redistribution and the actual redistribution. A normatively desirable
redistribution of property may still result – but perhaps with a fraction of
the original population. To be sure, this has been an acceptable price to pay
for saving Humanity from the more recalcitrant elements of homo sapiens
– at least according to the revolutionary founders of the first French
Republic. Others have been less sure. In the final quarter of the
19th century, the first professional association of social
scientists, the German Verein für Sozialpolitik, addressed this problem
by proposing a minimal welfare state as the price the rich should pay for
tolerating rapid social and economic change without generating civil unrest
(Rueschemeyer and van Rossum 1996). In this way, Germany could make a peaceful
internal transition to its emergent status as a global imperial player. In the
form of Bismarck's social security insurance scheme, conservative paternalism
thus made its formal contribution to the realization of socialist ideals, since
what had originated as a concession came to be a rallying point for Germany's
nascent Social Democratic Party. Nevertheless, Bismarck's scheme did serve to
immunize Germany from a Marxist proletarian revolution, whose potential
resemblance to the first French Republic frightened partisans on all sides.
Moreover, as long as the welfare state provided only the minimum – and not the
optimum – for the maintenance of social life, there was little chance that the
poor would ever have sufficient leisure to mount a credible organized challenge
to the rich. In this respect, Bismarck's welfare state was designed to
supplement Ricardo's 'iron law of wages', whereby workers are 'rationally' paid
just enough to keep them coming to work the next day. Whereas the conservatives
unwittingly paved the way to socialism in their attempt to maintain order in the
face of rapid change, the liberal-inspired promise of greater overall
productivity though greater cross-class mobility eventually won the political
argument to create more robust welfare states. This argument, popular among
Fabian socialists in Britain, was presented as a self-reinforcing 'virtuous
circle': The wealth of society as a whole is promoted by everyone doing what
they can do best, which means that everyone needs to be given the opportunity to
demonstrate what they can do, which in turn will result in greater wealth for
society as a whole. This shift in welfare orientation from the past to the
future presupposed a different justification for progressive taxation. Whereas
Bismarck's welfare initiatives mainly had the rich reward the poor for work well
done in keeping them rich, the Fabian welfare state would have the rich make
speculative investments on those most likely to maintain or increase their
wealth in the future. Accordingly, the welfare state's attention shifted to
'front-loaded' expenditures in preventive medicine and educational equality. Although the Fabians' more
generous sense of welfare came to define 'first world' nations by the third
quarter of the 20th century, the strategy has always faced two
countervailing forces that have tempted policymakers to return to the biological
roots of inheritance: the persistence with which the rich try to reclaim their
tax burden and the delay with which welfare beneficiaries improve their life
chances. Both potentially wreak havoc on party political campaigns by implicitly
raising the question of redistribution's transaction costs. It was against this
background of impatience that eugenics promised, so to speak, 'socialism
on the cheap' (Allen 1998). The two people most
responsible for advancing eugenics as an academically respectable basis for
policy in the Anglophone world – Francis Galton and Karl Pearson – were
self-styled 'scientific socialists' of the late 19th century (i.e.
before Marxists cornered the market on the expression). For Galton and Pearson,
the laissez faire policies of a so-called Social Darwinist like Herbert
Spencer were sociologically naïve because they underestimated the extent to
which a single illustrious progenitor could enable successive generations of
unproductive offspring to occupy powerful positions. Here the eugenicists took
specific aim at the British House of Lords. In a eugenic utopia, election to the
upper legislative chamber would be rationalized by examining entire family
histories to see which lineages demonstrated consistency or steady improvement
across generations. Moreover, on that basis, the eugenicist could expedite the
forces of natural selection by providing incentives to increase the reproductive
tendencies of the more illustrious lineages and to decrease those of the less
illustrious ones. The 20th century
was largely a story of eugenics run amok. To nations faced with an influx of
immigrants and mounting costs for public health and education, eugenics promised
an easy way out – indeed, at an increasing number of points in the
reproductive process, as knowledge of genetic causal mechanisms progressed (King
1999). Early in the century, changes could be induced in reproductive patterns
only by either modest incentives (e.g. tax breaks, income subsidies) or brute
force (e.g. sterilization, genocide): the one insufficiently compelling and the
other too repellent. However, today's eugenicists – now travelling under the
guise of 'genetic counsellors' – can intervene at several intermediate stages,
including amniocentesis and genetic screening, which are more likely to appeal
to a broad moral consensus. Indeed, following some
landmark cases in France, there is now legal precedent for presuming that one
has a 'right' not to have been born if those causally proximate to the birth
could have reasonably anticipated that he or she would lead a seriously
disadvantaged life (Henley 2002). The noteworthy feature of this judgement is
its presumption, a la Thatcher, that society as such shoulders no special
burden for the fate of its members. The judge ruled that the genetic
abnormalities called 'disabilities' are not prima facie opportunities for
socio-legal innovation, as, say, animal rights activists routinely urge on
behalf of their constituency. Rather, disabilities are pure liabilities, but
ones for which only the disabled person's parents and doctors are responsible. With this ruling, we have
come a long way from the strong welfarist perspective of John Rawls' (1972)
'veil of ignorance', which justified substantial redistribution of wealth on the
grounds that if one's own place in society is uncertain, then it is best to
allocate resources so that even the worst social position is not so bad. Indeed,
for some political philosophers, our increased ability to anticipate the
differential outcomes of the genetic lottery provides sufficient grounds for
rolling back Rawls altogether. For example, Hillel Steiner
(1998) has swung so far back to libertarianism that he would have tort law
absorb most of the state's claims to redistribute benefits and harms. Steiner
envisages a world in which a basic knowledge of genetic science and one's own
genetic constitution would become integral to citizen education, for which
individuals would then be held accountable as a normal part of self-management.
For the feminist legal theorist, Roxanne Mykitiuk (2003), this emerging
bioliberal regime is simply another step in the march of the post-Keynesian
state. Thus, policymakers imagine that as we acquire a more fine-grained
understanding of the relationship between our genes and our traits, the state
can safely retreat to the regulatory margins of the market, ensuring that
biomedical products do what is claimed of them. It is then up to the consumer,
provided with such information, to make a decision and endure the consequences. Ronald Dworkin (2000) has
updated Rawls to make a case for socialized insurance against genetic risk, a
strategy endorsed by the UK's leading cancer research charity as a basis for
public reinvestment in the National Health Service, despite current Labour
government policy to devolve healthcare to the private sector (Meek 2002). This
reinvention of the welfare state turns on an elementary point of genetic
science. Suppose we assume a fixed species or common gene pool – admittedly a
'closed system' that is placed increasingly under strain with progress in
biotechnology. Nevertheless, in that ideal case, genetics demonstrates both
the commonality of possible life chances (i.e. genotypes) and the
arbitrariness of the particular life chances that are realized in individuals
(i.e. phenotypes). Even given clear genetic markers for traits that are agreed
to be 'disabilities', the only way to prevent those disabilities from ever
arising at all would be to prevent the birth of anyone carrying the relevant
markers – even given the unlikelihood that any of the aborted would have led a
disabled life. The prenatal terminations proliferated by this approach are
called 'false positives' by statisticians and 'errors on the side of caution'
(on a mass scale) by everyone else. As a general policy for pre-empting
undesirable outcomes, it adumbrates an intolerably risk-averse society. (For
example, one landmark French case concerned a relatively common
disability, Down's Syndrome.) Yet, this policy is proposed as a post-welfarist
'paradise' embraced by not only neo-liberals but also ecologists, who invoke the
'precautionary principle' to similar effect. At this point, I must
comment on a serious rhetorical difficulty concerning the implications of
bioliberalism's devolved eugenic sensibility. The contrast between the welfare
state and bioliberalism is typically presented in terms of attitudes toward
risk: The former supposedly aims to minimize risk, while the latter aims at
least to accept risk, if not exactly to maximize it. However, given the ease
with which bioliberals pre-empt negative life chances, this way of putting the
matter is paradoxical. Although Rawls himself encouraged the view that
individuals are naturally risk-averse, the redistributionist strategies of the
welfare state in fact collectivise risk. In other words, the state
enables the reorganization of people so that they are capable of taking more
risks than they would or could as individuals. As either Spencer or Galton would
have seen from their different perspectives, the welfare state's redistribution
of resources artificially extends the selection environment to allow for the
survival of otherwise unfit individuals – presumably because of the
anticipated long term benefit that such individuals would provide for the rest
of society. In cases of subsidised education and healthcare to ambitious and
clever children from poor homes, the social benefits are palpable within a
couple of decades. However, the benefits derived from special educational and
health facilities for the disabled depend on more extended notions of humanity. Martha Nussbaum (2001) has
suggested that the policy imagination is recharged by the periodic adoption of
what Max Weber would have called a ‘re-enchanted’ view toward so-called
‘monstrous births’, such that they are not problems to be avoided or
liabilities to be minimized – but rather symbolic events from which we learn
something deep about what it means to be one of ‘us’. Yet, the nature of
this ‘depth’ is far from mysterious. It simply requires interpreting the
monstrous birth as an occasion to extend the definition of the human rather than
to have the birth excluded for failing to conform to the current definition.
(The anthropology of Mary Douglas and the philosophy of science of Imre Lakatos
provide interesting precedents for this line of thought: see Bloor 1979; Fuller
& Collier 2003: chaps. 5, 7.) Historically speaking, such an attitude has
been integral to the distinctive push of Western scientific medicine to regard
death – like war, so said Jacques Chirac – as always an admission of
failure. The unconditional commitment to the prolonging of human life, no matter
the cost, or even the consequences for those whose lives are prolonged, is a
secular descendant of the monotheistic concern for the weak and infirm members
of homo sapiens. In these most vulnerable parties -- at least according
to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- lies the human stripped of its worldly
power to a form that only God could recognize as ‘His’ own
(Fuller 2000b, 2002b). The
Great Leap Backward from Humanity to the Politics of Nature While it is convenient to
argue that the concrete failures of socialism and social science explain the
great ideological leap backward, an important part of the explanation lies in
the diffusion of political interest from the specifically human to a more
generic sense of life. No doubt, this reflects the cultural impact of
Neo-Darwinism on contemporary political and ethical intuitions. But it also
reflects a profound change in political economy. The original defenders of
animal rights were urban dwellers like Epicurus, Lucretius, Montaigne, and
Bentham, who held no special brief for protecting the natural environment.
Indeed, their pro-animal thinking was part of a general strategy of rescuing all
sentient beings from captivity in ‘the state of nature’ (Plender 2001). For
them, as for Linnaeus, Lord Monboddo, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the highest
compliment one could pay an animal was to say that it was fit for human company.
Animal rights came to be absorbed into a general ecological ethic only with the
decline of agriculture as a mode of production. Thus, by the time Peter Singer
(1981) came to speak of ‘expanding the circle’ of moral responsibility, he
ultimately had the entire planet in his sights – that is the preservation of
animal habitats, not simply the incorporation of animals into human society. I cannot say exactly when
animal rights came to be associated with a specifically anti-humanistic
sensibility, one that places greater value on wild over domestic animal
existence. Nevertheless, the assimilation of animal rights to a global
ecological ethic has served to lower both the criteria for an adequate
human existence (i.e. to the minimization of suffering) and the tolerance
for individual humans who fail to meet those criteria (i.e. the disabled, the
infirm, perhaps even the unwanted). In other words, an extension of rights to
animals in general has been accompanied by a restriction of rights to specific
classes of humans. Fuller (2001a) portrays this
development as a scientific version of La Rochefoucauld’s maxim,
‘Familiarity breeds contempt’. In effect, animals receive the benefit of the
doubt in a global ecological ethic simply because less is known about them. A
reified version of this judgement is central to the Aristotelian tradition:
Animals are morally neutral in a way that humans are not because the former
always realize their lower potential, whereas the latter often do not realize
their higher potential. Admittedly, disabled humans are not personally
responsible for their failure to realize their potential, but still their lives
are valued less when compared to that of able-bodied humans. In light of this
lingering Aristotelian sensibility, an unintended long-term value of conducting
more research into animals might be that greater familiarity with the grades of
animal life will enable similarly nuanced judgements of animals, including
perhaps making them liable for their own unrealised potential. As we have seen, the concept
of welfare has been dissipated in two respects. On the one hand, ecologists have
wanted to ‘expand the moral circle’ to cover animal welfare. In a
post-socialist period when tax bases are certainly not growing, and are often
shrinking, this policy invariably involves spreading welfare provision more
thinly among humans. It has resulted in more explicit discussions of tradeoffs
in legal coverage and even ‘triage’ in healthcare. In this context, John
Stuart Mill gets his comeuppance for having the temerity to presume that a
disabled Socrates (Stephen Hawking?) was worth more than an able-bodied pig. On
the other hand, neo-liberals want simply to withdraw state involvement from all
but the most basic welfare provision, converting individual tax burdens into
added spending power that may be used as individuals see fit. New developments in
genomic-based biotechnology offer comfort to both the ecological and the
neo-liberal views of welfare provision. On the one hand, the ontology underlying
the new biotechnology stresses a 95%+ genetic overlap between humans and most
other animals, creating a presumptive parity of interests and rights. On the
other hand, the research agenda of the new biotechnology is oriented toward the
identification of specific abnormalities in specific strands of DNA, which
ultimately would enable each individual to have a comprehensive understanding of
her genetic strengths and weaknesses, so that she can make an ‘informed
choice’ about the degree and kind of healthcare she is likely to need. For a
sense of political contrast, an ‘old socialist’ would read the ‘95%+’
figure as grounds for encouraging xenotransplantation, gene therapy, and animal
experimentation – all in aid of maximizing the use of animals to promote human
welfare. Moreover, rather than focusing on the uniqueness of each person’s
DNA, the old socialist would note that they are combinations of elements drawn
by chance from a common genetic pool. A sign that both the
ecologists and the neo-liberals have evacuated the ground previously held by the
red parties is that the welfare of the most vulnerable members of human society
is largely abandoned as an explicit policymaking goal -- though both continue to
make arguments to the effect that the poor and disabled might benefit
indirectly, such as by trickle-down economics or even some ‘mercy killing’
(especially if the minimization of suffering is taken to be an overriding
value). Indeed, there is a tendency for both ecologists and neo-liberals to
speak as if the fundamental problems of poverty and immiseration that gave rise
to the labour movement and socialist parties have been already more-or-less
solved – much as it is often claimed that certain previously widespread
diseases like smallpox and polio have now been eradicated. But both sides of the
analogy turn out to be empirically flawed and maybe even conceptually confused,
if they assume that social progress, once made, is irreversible and hence worthy
of benign neglect. For their part, sociologists
have done relatively little to illuminate this rather strange sense of ‘living
in the future’ that characterizes contemporary post-welfarist politics, even
as the gap between the rich and the poor within and between countries has
arguably increased. Instead, sociologists have fixated on the generalized
exposure to risk that the devolution of the welfare state has wrought, and the
self-organizing ‘lifestyle politics’ that have emerged in its wake. It would
seem that with the decline of the welfare state has come a phenomenologization
of the sociological sensibility, as if the ontology of social structures
dissolves right alongside the devolution of state power. I refer here, of
course, to the so-called ‘risk society’ thesis introduced by Ulrich Beck
(1992) and popularised in the guise of ‘ontological insecurity’ by Anthony
Giddens (1990). However, this is not quite phenomenology as Alfred Schutz
understood it -- nor is it politics as anyone normally understands it. At the dawn of the mass
media, Schutz (1964) famously argued that radio gave listeners a false sense of
immediacy of events happening far beyond their everyday life experiences, which
might embolden them into political intervention. (He was worried about fascist
propaganda galvanizing the petty bourgeoisie.) If we replace ‘radio’ with
‘internet’, Schutz’s reservations would seem to apply to the lifestyle
politics associated with, say, the anti-globalization movement. This change of
media enables the anti-globalizationists to control the means of knowledge
production to a substantial extent, but it also enables them to autonomize their
activities from ordinary politics. What is noticeably lacking from this movement
– especially when compared with the old labour movement -- is sustained
engagement with the people on whose behalf the demonstrations are made.
Protestors tend not to be members of the classes represented but well-educated,
well-meaning people who – by virtue of age, disposable income, or employment
situation – can easily transport themselves to the first-world sites where
global political and economic oppressors happen to congregate. The actual
oppressed are typically too busy working in third-world sweatshops or fearful of
local political reprisals to demonstrate for themselves. To some extent, this lack of
sustained engagement already had precedents in the failure of university-based
activism in the 1960s and 1970s to touch base with industrial labour, even
though much of the academic political rhetoric concerned ‘class oppression’.
With the 20/20 vision afforded by hindsight, we may say that the more ecological
and libertarian features of campus radicalism held little appeal to organized
labour, with its generally solidarist strategy for retaining factory jobs. Of
course, the jury is out on whether the anti-globalization movement really serves
the interests of those they claim to represent. Nevertheless, the movement
already displays some distinctive contexts of interaction. The representatives
and the represented – the protestors and the oppressed -- are usually limited
to ‘photo-ops’ in the broadest sense, ranging from the protestors briefly
visiting oppressed habitats in the presence of the cable television news
channels to the protestors themselves filming the oppressed to raise
consciousness at home. It is easy to see how such
self-appointed representation of others suits a reduction of the politics of
humanity to a ‘politics of nature’. For example, animal rights activists do
not organize animals to revolt against their human oppressors, nor do they
necessarily spend much time around animals – though they visit sites of animal
captivity, mainly to bring back evidence of their cruelty to the humans who
might make a difference to their fate. While this political strategy is
perfectly understandable vis-à-vis animals, it should cause the heart of any
socialist to sink when applied to humans: Where are the attempts to persuade
the locals that they should organize themselves to revolt against their
oppressors? Of course, in the
current political climate, the few such attempts that do occur are regarded as
‘treason’ and ‘terrorism’ – indeed, as they were when socialists acted
similarly in the 19th century. Yet, the original socialists were not
deterred by the threat of state sanction because they believed that the locals
could be persuaded of their point-of-view and, crucially, that fact would
contribute evidence to the view’s correctness. This result, in turn, would
embolden the enlarged comradeship to continue spreading the word worldwide. Here we see one of the many
senses in which socialism tried to realize the spirit of Christianity in a
secular guise (MacIntyre 1994). Presupposed in the socialist project – at
least in this organizational phase before it became the dominant state party of
any country – was a sense that one’s own faith in the project had to be
tested against the unconverted. This gave socialism much of its heroic quality,
but it also meant that the doctrine was responsive to the resistance it met from
those on whose behalf socialists aspired to speak. In contrast, the
anti-globalizationists are essentially a self-appointed emancipatory movement
that does not require its subjects to confirm its perspective. Read
uncharitably, the anti-globalizationists would appear to be risk-averse or
dogmatic in their own sociological horizons. In effect, they have assimilated
the plight of oppressed humans to that of the natural environment, whose consent
they would also never dream of seeking. In this respect, they engage in a
‘dehumanization’ of politics -- albeit a benevolently inspired one.
Other attempts to provide a
post-welfarist grounding for sociology have foundered on the shoals of ‘body
politics’. In his keynote address to the annual meeting of the British
Sociological Association in 2002, Bryan Turner, a founder of the sociology of
the body, a popular field speciality, argued for a division of labour within
social science to recapture the distinction between a universal human nature and
differences among particular societies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the proposed
division was a phenomenologically inspired one – between the universal
experience of pain and the culturally relative manifestations of suffering.
For Turner a supposed advantage of this redefinition is that it draws the
boundary of the social’s domain right at the interface with the natural world.
Thus, Turner would extend sociology’s remit to cover areas previously ceded to
psychology and the biomedical sciences. Unfortunately, this extension comes at
the price of attenuating the definition of the ‘social’ in ways that, once
again, give comfort to both ecologists and neo-liberals at the expense of the
old left: ‘The social’ is reducible to a collection of traits possessed by
individuals (the neo-liberal turn) and, moreover, these traits are defined such
that their possessors need not be humans (the ecological turn). It marks a
return to an ontology that sees the difference between ‘species’, ‘race’
and ‘culture’ as matters of degrees, not kinds, and a normative ideal that
is fixated on the ideal member of one such group rather than the exemplary
collective product that ‘humanity’ was meant to be. Conclusion: A New Foundation for Genetics in the Social
Welfare Sciences No one denies the
unprecedented nature of what we know about the genetic constitution of humans
and other animals, as well as our capacity for genetic intervention both in
vivo and in vitro. What remains – and will always remain – in
doubt is our control over the consequences. Genetics is an irreducibly
statistical science. Indeterminacy occurs on at least three levels: interaction
effects among genes in a genome, from genotype to phenotype, and the interaction
effects between genetic makeup and the environment. In this respect, the very
term ‘biotechnology’ masks a socially significant gap between knowledge and
control. Interestingly, at the dawn of the 20th century, when
eugenicists learned from the Hardy-Weinberg theorem that most disabilities would
remain unexpressed in the individuals carrying the relevant genes, they did not
admit defeat for their program of selective breeding. Rather, they intensified
their research, as if the indeterminacy were ignorance that could be eliminated
through more precise genetic knowledge and invasive genetic technology (Paul
1994: chap. 7). However, as one might expect of any complex phenomenon, this
research has succeeded in posing new problems as it solved old ones. The statistical nature of
genetic science provides the best chance for reviving the fortunes of both
social science and socialism in the 21st century. But the realization
of this future requires a genuine Hegelian ‘sublation’ of genetics. In other
words, the status of genetics as a body of knowledge needs to be reduced before
it can be properly incorporated into a renovated conception of ‘society’.
Specifically, it must come to be seen not as an autonomous, let alone
foundational, science but as a ‘mere’ social technology that can be
explained, justified, and applied by a wide variety of theories, ideologies, and
policies. Ideally, this involves divesting genetics of its status as a
paradigmatic science with a canonical history and fixed location on the
intellectual landscape. Indeed, we should aim for the phrase ‘genetic
engineering’ to become a pleonasm. Genetics must become like the economy,
which is no longer the preserve of laissez faire liberals but a generally
recognized and multiply interpretable societal function. However, given the
prevalence of what Richard Dawkins (1976) notoriously popularised as the
‘gene’s eye-view of the world’, the public understanding of genetics
continues to conjure up the spectre of totalitarian regimes, comparable to the
public understanding of political economy, circa 1810, which evoked
images of dehumanised exchange relations. The analogy runs deeper,
since Dawkins draws – perhaps unwittingly – on the reversal of means and
ends that Marx used so effectively in Capital to illustrate
capitalism’s perversion of value. Just as money drives the exchange of
commodities, ‘selfish genes’ use willing organisms to reproduce themselves.
In contrast, with renewed sociological vision, genes should not be seen as the
prime movers of life but organic by-products of procreation, a means by which
people perpetuate several legally sanctioned social formations -- most
traditionally the family -- as they bring the next generation into existence. To
be sure, these organic by-products are themselves socially significant as
regulators of individuals’ bodily functions. Nevertheless, describing the
genetic basis of humanity in such ontologically diminished terms draws attention
to the subservient role of the gene, which through changes in the constitution
of society and extensions in our biomedical capabilities (not least
‘cyborganization’) may itself come to be transformed, obviated,
supplemented, or even replaced. Moreover, in keeping with a
welfarist sensibility, this sociological revaluation of genetics places it
squarely in the realm of human endeavour, specifically a product of collective
labour that draws indeterminately on a common pool of resources in order to
increase society’s overall value. Moreover, the value of this product – the
offspring – is measured by all the factors that go into its actual production
rather than some inherent value of its raw material (as in the extreme
bioliberalism of the ‘right not to be born’ rulings). The relative weighting
of these factors and the identity of their bearers are the natural stuff of
politics. Indeed, a society’s genetic potential is the nearest that nature
comes to providing a res publica, a focus for public deliberation and
collective action. A ‘politics of the gene’ should be part of an integrated
welfare policy that encompasses the pre-natal situation, the conditions of birth
and infancy, child-rearing and formal education, as well as preventive,
diagnostic, and curative health care. As in debates over taxation, there are
many possible points of intervention for influencing an individual’s life
chances. Each proposes to redistribute the costs and benefits across society
rather differently, usually in accordance with some vision of justice. And as in
debates over, say, the taxation of inherited wealth, we may look forward to the
day when reasonable people disagree over specifically genetic interventions
without demonising those whose arguments test the extremes of political
possibility. In the end, what matters is the democratic framework for taking
these decisions, one that invites the regular examination and possible reversal
of standing policies (Fuller 2000a). It is clear that renewed
attention to the concept and processes of redistribution should be central to
sociology for the 21st century. In the first place, a property
possessed by an individual may be normatively positive or negative, depending on
the legal authorization for its transmission. Indeed, there are Biblical grounds
for this notion. Biblical literalists concede that the only evil form of
transmission is biological reproduction, which grants legitimacy to later
generations simply by virtue of being a genetic descendant of Adam, the original
sinner. A more sanctified form of transmission requires a formal renunciation of
what was evil in this legacy, as in baptism or its secular equivalent, an
examination that gives a candidate the opportunity to renounce one’s former
ignorance or prejudice. Moreover, even if we grant that people are ‘by
nature’ selfish to the point of being prone to use violence to protect their
individual inheritance, they may nonetheless improve their sociability simply by
the legal transfer of these violent tendencies to the state as executor of their
collective inheritance, which is tantamount to maintaining the conditions under
which the people remain sociable. The ‘arts of citizenship’ from military
training to regular elections encapsulate this species of political alchemy.
Accordingly, potential combatants are compelled to focus on particular
activities with clearly demarcated rules of engagement rather than ‘taking the
law into their hands’. The reinvention of sociology
will also benefit from the mutual recognition of the fundamental equality of
individuals that accompanies a redistributionist ethic. ‘Equality’ here is
meant in mainly negative terms, namely, the arbitrariness and potential
reversibility of whatever conditions actually differentiate members of a
society, be it to one’s own advantage or disadvantage. This point may be seen
as another way of sublimating the uncertainty that besets homo sapiens in
a Hobbesian state of nature (e.g. the Rawlsian ‘original position’) or more
positively – following Alasdair MacIntyre (2000) – as identifying humanity
with a sense of reciprocity, that is, the capacity for giving and taking. Our
achievements are largely due to the collaboration and license of others who
neither question our motives nor themselves materially benefit from those
achievements. They simply expect that we would act similarly toward them under
similar circumstances. Included here are the background institutions that
economists say ‘minimize transaction costs’. (However, Alvin Gouldner [1973]
intriguingly suggested that it may be the separate development of the
‘giving’ and ‘taking’ phases of reciprocity – that is, beneficence and
exploitation – that mark the human.) Regardless of aetiology, an
egalitarian attitude counteracts both complacency about success and fatalism
about failure: Informed with a vivid sense that the future may well not
copy the past, people will endeavour to make their collective efforts exceed
whatever they might do individually or in a more socially restricted capacity.
The outstanding question that remains is which individuals are eligible for this
sort of equality: Is the redistributionist regime limited to only and all those
genetically marked as homo sapiens? Whereas socialists traditionally answered yes without
hesitation, today neo-liberals deny the ‘all’ and ecologists the ‘only’
premised in the question. In today’s ideological debates over biotechnology,
neither neo-liberals nor ecologists speak consistently on behalf of all of
humanity, although it is clear that specific humans are likely to benefit from
politically realizing one or the other side. Here a renewed socialist
sensibility would make a point of prioritizing the maintenance and
extension of specifically human traits, forms, and projects. In conclusion, I must
observe that to compare genetic potential with, say, labour power or inherited
wealth is, in an important sense, to render the raw material of our lives banal.
Moreover, from a sociological standpoint that regards humanity as a collective
project initiated by homo sapiens, that is exactly how it should be: Our
humanity lies exclusively in what we make of our genetic potential, not
in the potential itself. In this respect, Aristotelians were right to hold
humanity to a higher standard of achievement than animals – but only because
we had already achieved so much, not because our raw material was intrinsically
better. The task for sociology in the 21st century, then, is to
reclaim the ground that the a posteriori has lost to the a priori
in our conception of humanity. For example, what Aristotelians regard as
‘virtuous capacities’ need to be recovered as ‘beneficial consequences’.
A telling target for recovery is the ‘law of diminishing marginal utility’,
the fundamental principle of welfare economics, which began life very much
inspired by the idea of humanity as a normative project but became a
naturalistic account of how humans ‘always already’ behave. I earlier noted that John
Stuart Mill, despite his links to sociology’s founder, Auguste Comte, is
conspicuous by his absence from canonical histories of the discipline. Mill
originally invoked the law of diminishing marginal utility to demonstrate how
liberty and equality could be jointly maximized: If someone possesses a
sufficient amount of a good, the overall welfare of society would be increased
by transferring any additional amounts to someone who lacks the good. The basic
idea is that the resulting compression of the difference in goods would be
generously offset by the additional freedom that the transfer’s beneficiary
would gain to satisfy her wants. Mill interpreted this principle as a policy
injunction to redistribute income so that everyone can make the most use of
society’s resources. He presupposed that economic laws serve as normative
correctives to injustices that result from artificial restrictions on the free
flow of goods and services that have been backed by generations of legal
enforcement. Genetics may provide an opportunity for sociology to return to this
Millian sensibility. However, it is worth
recalling that ‘economic science’ formally broke with ‘political
economy’ when William Stanley Jevons successfully contested Mill’s
interpretation of the law of diminishing marginal utility in the third quarter
of the 19th century (Fuller 2001b). Jevons held that the principle is
meant to represent, not correct, nature. In that respect, it behaves
exactly like a physical law. The appropriate use for the principle, then, is not
to decide on policies for correcting injustices but to identify the frame of
reference within which one can say that this principle is already
operating – the invisible hand’s implicit reach. From this reinterpretation
came the ‘positivist’ turn that has increasingly marked the history of
economics – in particular, a focus on formal models of idealized closed
systems (a la Newtonian mechanics) and panglossian explanations for the
distribution of resources in actual societies: The urge to redistribute wealth
was thus permanently kept in check by the search for hidden redistributions
happening elsewhere in the economy. Certain bioliberal tendencies in the social
sciences, by making too easy a peace with the emergent forms of biotechnology,
come dangerously close to setting us once again on the Jevonian path of least
normative resistance, which would in turn only serve to set our disciplines back
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